Renaissance Lets Hair Down

Human hair has been the subject of countless cultural entanglements over the centuries. Most of all, hair is tightly written into the definitions of sexuality and gender.

What art historian Emanuele Legris calls “the hegemonic Christian depreciation of hairstyles” may be best represented by the 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas. A monk, Aquinas is usually represented with the top of his head shaved and wearing a tonsure that signifies humility. Built on the father of the early church, Augustine of Hippo, Aquinas bound his hair together in the surplus of his body, along with urine and feces. They are, No When Judgment Day comes, he will be resurrected with his body. Hair was irrelevant when it wasn’t irreverent as a symbol of fiery desire.

The idea that everyone is hairless in Heaven may not have been accepted by some Renaissance artists. One of his classic ideas revived in the Italian peninsula during this period was the intricate hairstyle as an adornment of female beauty (at least as consumed by men).Ovid’s Ars Amatria I was especially in awe of hair. And Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445–1510) emerged as the great painter of hair, which Legris called “the threshold to the erotic desires” of the spectator.

An example is Botticelli’s Portrait of an Idealized Woman (reportedly by Simonetta Vespucci)seems to have been Painted in the early 1480s.of long, ponytail, braid, curly, honey blonde hair It is adorned with more than 200 painted pearls at a time when wearing pearls in public was against Florentine luxury laws.

“Interest in the creative possibilities of hair has grown, but what is hair, if not a mass of lines that can be shaped into any shape? No one has harnessed its complexity more than Botticelli. I did,” wrote Legris. Botticelli made the distinctive hairstyle his signature during his first twenty years as a painter. “This strategy paid off because arresting The Rock became a prerequisite for female attraction”.

This left Botticelli without friends in the church. Hair was not just a theological superfluous, dismissed as worthless to the state of the immortal soul. A woman’s hair was a trap, luring men and boys to lust. In the words of Girolamo Savonarola in 1490, a few years before he made a puritanical bonfire in his vanity, eight years before he himself was burned at the stake, the women and girls who unveiled at Mass. was a trap for both “angels and priests”.

Legris writes that Botticelli’s painted hair is a “network of ropes, levers and cantilevers” that acts as a “muscular work to draw the spectator’s attention”. But this piece was fighting the odds. Religious persecution won. By the 1490s, Botticelli “had refrained from painting his fine mane, covered his hair with thick layers of cloth, or turned it into wavy streaks, repeating as long as he did”. Botticelli was no slouch in his youth either when it came to painting men’s hair. Christ of Corcovado The work, circa 1500, is “the only late painting in which he still shows an interest in hair.”

Lugli observes that “until recently, interest in hair remained in the margins of art history.” For example, noted aficionado Bernard Berenson considered Leonardo de Vinci’s Bald Head to be the finest painting of the Renaissance, and Legris “supported the patriarchal moralism that has shaped the discipline of art history. ‘ said.

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